Stanford Humanities Center
Karla Oeler is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. Her research and teaching take a comparatist approach to film and literary history, theory, and criticism.
SHC Project
The Surface of Things: Cinema and the Devices of Interiority
The Surface of Things: Cinema and the Devices of Interiority innovates a distinctive approach to the study of adaptation: instead of focusing on a particular story (or other content) as it moves from one medium to another, the book examines specific techniques that originate with literature and are claimed by film. These techniques are soliloquy, interior monologue, and free indirect discourse; they were designed to show interiority; and influential filmmakers and critics claimed them for cinema at critical moments in film history. The Surface of Things explores their formal refraction as they pass from literature into film.
A Grammar of Murder: Violent Scenes and Film Form (The University of Chicago Press, 2009). Chinese translation (Beijing World Publishing Corporation, 2014)
“Eisenstein’s Shakespeare,” [Эйзенштейновский Шекспир] Eisenstein for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Naum Kleiman. (Moscow: Publishing House of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2020).
“The Sound of Pomegranates: Poetic Cinema as a Foreign Language,” Screen 59:4 (Winter 2018).
“Nikolai Cherkasov in Ivan the Terrible,” Close-Up, Great Cinematic Performances Volume 2: International, ed. Murray Pomerance and Kyle Stevens (Edinburgh University Press, 2018).
“Of Cats and Men: Eisenstein, Art and Thinking,” The Flying Carpet: Studies on Eisenstein and Russian Cinema in Honor of Naum Kleiman, ed. Joan Neuberger and Antonio Somaini, Éditions Mimésis, 2017.
“Eisenstein and Horror.” The Design and Componentry of Horror [Special Issue], Journal of Visual Culture 14:3 (December 2015), ed. Caetlin Benson-Allott and Eugenie Brinkema.
